Now it is obvious that Gentoo does not have the kind of public relations that Ubuntu has, Gentoo is not on its way to becoming a synonym for Linux. Gentoo also does not have a PR team like KDE has that promises pretty much anything anyone ever thought of.

So I”ll try to give my thoughts on the question with a few subheadings to structure it:

Why not Gentoo.

If you want to use Gentoo because someone told you that with all those insane compiler flags you get a system that runs 3 times as fast than it used to you”re wrong here. If some compiler switch would magically make everything faster without breaking many things every binary distro would use it. If optimizations for special processor types made everything magically retardedly fast, every distro would offer optimized builds. You don”t magically gain a lot of speed by adding a few compiler flags.

If you just need a system to run fast that needs little actual knowledge or has pretty much no special task you will probably be happier with some other distro: Gentoo sometimes requires you to edit a configuration file yourself, you might have to actually do something (which is often explained in the handbook or the text that you get while installing) but if you are allergic to reading a manual you won”t have much fun with Gentoo.

There”s the myth around that Gentoo is hard to install (which it is not because the very detailed handbook is assisting you in every step along the way) so if you wanna gain geek-credibility by telling people that you can actually install Gentoo, you”re wrong, too. If installing Gentoo is really hard for you, you either have really twisted hardware (like a friend of mine) or you did not read the handbook.

So after these few remarks, let”s look at why you might want to have Gentoo

Why Gentoo.

With Gentoo you get a box with all the tools you need to build your own custom distribution. That does not mean that Gentoo lacks packages and that the software selection is small (in contrary, it”s quite big!), but it means that whenever the generic package that someone created does not suffice for your needs it”s ridiculously easy to modify the package in a sane way.

All patches that Gentoo packages apply while building are transparent, you see them being applied, you can check them out, you can easily copy a package “ebuild” (the little piece of information that you need to build a package) to a local “overlay” (an overlay is like a repository of ebuilds) and modify it to exclude or include a patch or to use some different build or configure flags.

Gentoo packages have “useflags” with means little variables you set either system-wide or on a per-package-base that tell the system what kind of features you want: If you have “gnome” in your useflags, your packages will get build with support for Gnome, if you have “-kde” your packages will not build any support for Kde. That means with a few simple settings you get a system where you don”t have to hunt down some “package-I-want-plugins-feature-I-want” package because if you say you want something that feature is build (and the dependencies based on that are resolved of course). This does not just allow you to get all the features you really want in a very convenient way, it also allows you to switch everything off you do not need which means less code runs on your system. Less code means less chance for an attacker to find a hole in it and less load on your system running code you don”t want anyways.

Gentoo has basically two “flavours”: the ARCH version and the ~ARCH version (ARCH here means your architecture for me it”s x86 for example). The ~ARCH version is what Debianistas might call “unstable” which means that that is where packages go to be evaluated by a wider audience. There might be bugs but the versions are always very new. In ARCH flavour does only include packages that have not had bugs for a few weeks to be sure that the software in that version has been tested enough by ~ARCH people. But you don”t have to chose, you can just cherrypick with package you want from where. If you want a ARCH system for its stability but want the newest Apache web server that is very easy, you just add one line to a textfile saying that apache should please come from ~ARCH.

Gentoo does rolling-updates which means that the tree of packages updates all the time. The actual “releases” do not mean as much as they do for other distros. You know how when you get a new ubuntu version and 2 weeks later a package gets updated with really cool features and you have a hard time getting the according package installed (or you have to wait 6 months)? Not with Gentoo. When new software is released you get it as an update. If you have to change something, the system tells you what to do. No pain in the ass full system upgrade every X months which is a really big benefit.

Gentoo does not try to do everything for you, set everything up in a default way. For some things the service comes pretty much unconfigured and you have to set it up yourself. But that makes sense: You don”t want buttloads of open spam-sending emailservers out there just because of bad default configurations. If you want to setup a mail server for example the Gentoo documentation (the handbook, the gentoo wiki and the forums) will give you all you need, but again you”ll have to be willing to read the docs. And you should because you should understand what you are doing.

The documentation of Gentoo is (from what I have seen) the best one in all the linux distributions. It”s complete and very well written, not just a wiki with the hope that some user might figure out how to do stuff (I don”t have anything against wikis, I love them, but they should not replace documentation, they should enhance it.

When using Gentoo for a while you will learn stuff, just because you are forced to read manuals. And because the system is not just stitched together with a bunch of magic scripts that take all the control from you. After a short while you know what your system does and how it does it. That is a huge plus because our computer should not be a black box to us, we need to easily understand what happens why (because computers are a direct extension of our mind when we use them to communicate and work on ideas).

The last aspect I wanna add is the community. The Gentoo forums are (if you stay away from the off topic area ) a great source of knowledge and support, there are a lot of people reading them that know what they are doing and that can and will help you. Then there”s also planet larry that aggregates the blogs of Gentoo users which is always a good way to keep up with what people are having problems with. You also can easily get in tough with other users that way and pick up one or another trick along the way.

So if you want a very customizeable, well-documented distribution that does not make it hard for you to get exactly the software you want and need with the features you want, a distro that allows you to learn and that does help you get a better system that suits exactly your needs, Gentoo might be for you. If you like to know how your system works, if you want a distro that you can easily shape from a general tool to a very specialized one for your own personal needs you probably want Gentoo. If you want high quality in your default packages you probably want Gentoo (at least from my personal experience some Gentoo packages work better than the ones other distributions have).

Those are the reasons why I prefer Gentoo. If you read this and use Gentoo yourself, comment on Ben”s thread or write your own text. Tell people why you use Gentoo or maybe even why you don”t. Of course you can also comment here )